This is the first in a series of columns that will describe the fundamental characteristics of effective business strategy.  In today’s competitive environment, a well-conceived and complete strategy is critical to the success of printing/graphic communications companies.  Like all industries, the printing industry is constantly evolving, and this evolutionary process, in time, changes the ground rules that govern competition in the industry.  Today, printers are competing in ways that could not have been imagined as recently as twenty or thirty years ago.  And the emergence of new ways of competing has elevated the importance of business strategy to printing/graphic communications companies.

For many decades, most printing companies were quintessential job shops.  They manufactured printed materials based on specifications provided by customers, typically using “raw materials”—artwork, photographs, copy and/or digital files—also provided by customers.  During the job shop era, printing companies competed on the basis of quality and operating efficiency.  Obviously, printers had to thoroughly understand job specifications, but they really didn’t need to know a great deal about their customers’ business operations or communications objectives.  This meant that most printing companies could easily serve almost any kind of customer because the range of services provided was limited to print manufacturing.  In addition, most printing companies could manufacture a wide variety of printed materials, with the only real constraint being the capabilities of the equipment a company operated.  For these reasons, most strategic issues in the job shop era related in some way to equipment.

The competitive environment is now far different.  Over time, basic print manufacturing services became commodities that earned only commodity-level profits.  To deal with the problems of commoditization, many printing companies diversified to offer a variety of non-print services in addition to “ink on paper.”  For many printing companies, the goal of diversification was to gain the ability to provide more comprehensive communications solutions to customers.  Strategy is essential to being a successful solution provider because managers of solution providers face more complex business choices than those confronted by job shop manufacturers.  They must decide, for example, what kinds of customers to serve and how to create value for those particular customers, what specific solutions to offer, and what technological capabilities to acquire or develop.